Need more free music? A new link on the VCU portal puts you just clicks away from Ruckus, a new, legal media-downloading program aiming to rival iTunes.
“We came down to Ruckus because it had more music than the other sites and the advertising was a little less annoying,” said Jessica Lee, student body president.
“Plus, you can’t beat that price.”
The price is free to students across the country. If you have an .edu e-mail address, you may log onto Ruckus.com, download its player and have access to more than 2.5 million songs.
“Being able to share music with friends is something we can all enjoy,” Lee said.
How can Ruckus offer something so vast for such a small price?
“The entire service is ad-based,” Lee said. “There’s obviously incentive to get the large amounts of people on our campus to use the product since there’s such big money in advertising.”
With so many students using the Internet around campus, Ruckus offers a solution to music downloading by giving students a legal use of bandwidth.
“We had a couple demonstrations given to the student senate … and we pushed the administration to go ahead with the general concept of getting a music downloading service,” Lee said. “VCU is actually considering cracking down on more people because we have such limited service space and bandwidth.”
Not to mention, illegally acquiring music can be hazardous to one’s computer, Lee said.
“I think this is better than having them crack down and being unsafe by using a program that will eventually get a virus on your computer,” Lee said.
The music might be free, but record companies are still trying to prevent students from having free reign over their products.
“(Ruckus) is not perfect, but we’ve seen on campuses throughout the country that people are getting prosecuted for stealing music,” Lee said.
While this legal way of collecting music is convenient, there is still no legal way to enjoy Ruckus’ library on your iPod because of digital rights management, controls placed on fi les for the sole purpose of copyright protection.
“That’s why they can give us the music,” Lee said.
Suggestions for circumventing the DRM, although in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, appear with a simple Google inquiry, however, allowing you to put the songs on any device you please.
In addition to this, one can also enter false information while registering one’s graduation year. This means you keep the player and the service for longer. This might be good news to some, considering that Ruckus might be around for
a while.
“They’re hoping to have TV shows up on there soon as well as expanding their movie library,” Lee said.